


Pale as the Stars Above

by Semianonymity



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-10
Updated: 2012-07-10
Packaged: 2017-11-09 13:18:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/455878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Semianonymity/pseuds/Semianonymity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade has a palecrush on Eridan. There’s a picnic. She is hopeless, and this situation is stupid. That is the sum of things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pale as the Stars Above

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Cherrybaum.

Carefully, Jade scrutinizes herself in the mirror, hands in tight knots to stop the electric thrill of nerves and hope and confusion. Because she'd always dressed the way she liked to, and hadn't worried much about what other people would think, but now it feels so _important_ to wear the right clothes, to send the right message.

Part of her, because she's human, wants to dress nicely, so that she'll impress him, so that he'll _like_ her. But that won't work, because she's so, so pale for him, and all she can think about, sometimes, is what it would feel like to hold his hand in hers, brush her fingertips up his arm, smooth his hair around his horns and make him wear something—anything—other than the cape, or at least one with a better collar, because she is diamond-longing for Eridan Ampora. It's a terrible idea. She's not even supposed to have conciliatory longings, as a human, but she's thought and _thought_ and there's nothing else to explain how she thinks he's terrible, absolutely terrible, but wonderful at the same time, and she wants to curl up on the floor with him and find out how his chest moves with his breathing with her head on him, and talk about his life and his problems and her problems, and he is a pathetic mess, a beautiful, gorgeous train wreck, and she hopes he feels the same way as she does. Does he ever look at her dresses and think, that could be so much _better_? Does he watch her wrestle with table manners and—and talking to people when she's tired and she can't make their words form into meaning in her head because it's so much harder to understand English than Bec when she's tired?

Of course, she doesn't want to know the answer.

But she can _do_ this. Her hair is brushed but hanging loose; her shirt is well-washed, soft against her skin, more comfortable than courageous, but her skirt is black as space and littered with green stars. And it's not much more than a thought and stretching out her mind and pulling, gently, to make a little fold in space and step across half an ocean.

At the beach, almost everyone else is already there, but not Eridan. Jade plays Frisbee, which she'd tried playing with Bec once, but she couldn't throw it fast enough. She doesn't use her space powers during the game, or at least not a lot, and John playing means that the wind buffets them all, and the Frisbee sometimes makes very unexpected turns indeed, which makes Karkat snarl—it makes Karkat snarl at least partially to make John laugh, which makes _her_ smile because Karkat is infuriating, but he needs to be to be John's friend and neighbor, his hive in the middle of small stretch of forest that now borders John's quiet suburb.

A little sweaty and hair an explosion of flyaway hairs and unexpected curls and knots-to-be, when the game ends Jade trots after the others back to the picnic shelter, firmly Their Territory because most trolls don't like daylight, the beach, or human recreational areas, where lethal strife is firmly banned. Most humans don't like trolls. This works fine for those times when they want their own space on the beach, and they can avoid conflict. If someone brings conflict to them, Rose—champion of shutting down unwanted comments via either eldritch powers or what John calls The Look, or possibly they are one and the same—is the first line of defense, or sometimes Gamzee. Or Equius. Or Roxy and Dirk, who in combination can either diffuse any situation or make it infinitely worse, no middle ground.

Usually the goal is to keep anyone from noticing the fact that they're even more abnormal than is immediately apparent.

Rose greets her with a hug—which makes Jade beam, because Rose tends to be skittish about touching! Even compared to normal people, because Jade herself touches even more than she should—and over Rose's shoulder Jade sees Eridan and she has to swallow down her immediate reaction, and also keep from staring at his face. His eyes flick over her, and then they're gone, and she's relieved and disappointed, a little nervous, not quite butterflies in the pit of her stomach but the sort of queasiness that comes from swallowing too much seawater.

Rose squeezes her once more and lets go, and Jade heads to the table with food on it to claim some before it's all gone—teenagers, all of them, with metabolisms like a bonfire, and Sollux and Dirk had teased her until she'd yelled the last time she'd growled at someone over dinner, it's an instinct, it's not like the trolls didn't pick up weird things from their lusii—and tries not to feel too self-conscious and fails.

So Eridan can be a little desperate. But they've all settled down, _all of them_ , and there's nothing—no reason for them to end up in a quadrant together. Certainly not the right quadrant. He probably still wants Feferi. Okay, so he was never anything other than flushed for her, but—

Dave distracts her for a while, and it's nice to talk to him. Dave makes her laugh, usually on purpose, and it's comfortable. Like having a brother, she thinks, leaning against his shoulder, his warmth bright against her skin as the night gets cold.

“Hey,” Dave says at one point, making her look back at him. “The Fish Prince is watching us.”

Jade swallows as she looks, peeking through the hair fallen over her face. It'll take forever to comb it out. She should have braided it, she thinks, and tries to prune away the hope that's overgrown her stomach and lungs, wrapping through all the empty little spaces between her organs. (She's aware of the dimensions of everything, now, she knows the location and size and mass of things inside and out. It had been terrifying, her first time—first time ever—in a big crowd of people, of strangers, trying to handle the rush of _shapes_ they made.)

“Huh,” Jade manages, dry-mouthed. “That's funny!”

“Nobody can resist the Strider charm,” Dave tells her, running on autopilot. Automatically, she can slap at his arm, which means he flashes away from her—but no one is faster than Space itself; herself—and then they chase each other around until they gang up with Nepeta to steal Jake's glasses instead.

When darkness falls, most of them end up around the fire, bickering and telling stories. Jade heads down to the shore. It's cold but she wades into the water, just until the tops of her toes are covered even when the tiny little wavelets have fully receded. Arms wrapped around her, mouth tight until the stress starts to dissolve out of her, pulled out to sea, she imagines, like the little particles of sand pulled out from under feet, joining the salts and dissolved minerals and the dissolved gasses and the microscopic life they support, countless tiny creatures, more of them by number and by weight than almost anything—

There's something rising out of the ocean, and she jumps before it resolves itself into Eridan, half-dressed—dressed for swimming, she corrects herself. The sky is bright above them, the pinpricks of stars faded by a near-full moon, and she can almost see him clearly.

“Nice night,” he says, uncertainly.

“Yeah,” Jade says, and clears her throat. She looks down at her feet, moves them out of the sand that the waves have half-buried them in. “You were swimming?”

“It's nice out here,” he says, like it's a surprise. It probably is. “And your human moon—” the words sneered, even though it's not, really, it's pink now and a little too big, and the planet is as much troll as human, “—is usually too fuckin' dim to see by at night.”

“Could you swim during the day? On Alternia?” Jade asks, curious, thinking things through—always trying to learn what she doesn't understand but, she reminds herself, she doesn't know anything about people or trolls, and there are definitely bad questions and she's started asking Rose about etiquette and in-person conversation and how to make normal eye contact during a conversation, because Dave's just as bad as she is and only partly on purpose, and because John mostly laughs.

She has no way of knowing what will just set Eridan off, send him off, ruin any chance she—she never really had. She's so _human_. She'll never be able to lock horns with him and lie face-to-face whispering endearments, and she'd cried at that scene in one of the movies Karkat had lent her, because Eridan's been ignoring every pale advance she's made and although she's physically pitiable, almost exaggeratedly so with no sharp teeth and no defensive horns and thin, soft skin, she's not a _troll_ , that's why, she's not even wired right, she can't even do normal human romance—she thinks—and Karkat loves telling her how _easy_ it is by comparison, mostly when she's asking for another movie recommendation (fuck him for having good taste!) and she wonders if Eridan ever gets cold and if she could bring him with her when she goes to visit Rose on the first day it snows, this year, because she's found herself, perversely, missing ice and cold. She wonders if Eridan likes hot chocolate.

“If you were deep enough,” Eridan says, after a pause that lasts a little too long. “Where the sunlight just didn't penetrate.” He stands a few feet down the shore from her, facing the other direction, so they'd be face-to-face and chest-to-chest, intimately close, if they were next to each other. “It's too cold here to go very deep.” He frowns, she thinks, but she can't see his face clearly, and she can't bring herself to turn to face him.

“Maybe you could visit sometime,” Jade tells him. “It's warm back home. All the time, really, when Nepeta and Terezi and Equius visited they all said it was kind of like Alternia!”

“Really?” he says and Jade fights back a gasp because _oh_ , that hurts. That he'd have to ask if she really meant it. “—yeah. I'd. Like that.”

“Good,” she says, and reminds herself to breath, silently. “I could bake us a cake, maybe, Jane's been showing me how, and maybe if you caught a fish—”

“Of course,” he says, preening, and she smiles reflexively in return, even if it's a hollow gesture because _she's not his moirail_.

“That sounds goods,” and internally she's growling because she's never _shy_ , this is so _stupid_...

All of this. So, so, so stupid.

She has a lock of her hair wrapped through her fingers, trying to pull through the knots that have appeared. Even if Rose always winces when she does that. (Rose has hair the texture of corn silk, thin and straight and slow-growing, and Rose is meticulous about caring for it. Jade used conditioner for the first time the night after the end of the game, because she'd already scrubbed her five times with soap and her hands still smelled like blood. It turned out it was caked under her fingernails.)

“You need detangler,” Eridan tells her, loftily, but his hand catches hers—she hadn't heard him move, his footsteps disguised by lapping waves. And he holds her hand still, slipping her fingers out, keeping her from ripping through the tangles. His voice wavers even more than normal.

“Eridan,” she says, voice catching in her throat, reaching for him, and her hand rests against his cheek without a second thought, oh no, but it fits so _perfectly_ there, the slight rasp of his skin like a cat's tongue, shark's skin, the tremble of his jaw underneath her fingers. “Eridan, when you come over, after we go swimming I'll need to comb all the knots out of my hair—before dinner—”

“I can't,” he says, and his voice is all angry edges, and he slaps her hand away. Jade's heart doesn't break because she's got nothing in her anymore but empty void. Even if, logically, her heart is the exact same dumb muscle as always, shifting constantly, in-and-out pumping. She can feel it. “Jade, I can't. You don't even know what you're doing, do you?” He is a small child, he's petulant, he's witheringly superior all the same, all condescension and desperation. “You're a diamond-breaker, you— you can't know—”

“Is it because I'm human?” Jade says, because that would somehow make it better. She can't hear him say that he's too good for her, or that she's too good for him, because she's _not_ , she's a mess, too, she really, really is, she wants him to help her face the world when it's too overwhelmingly, fucking, just _too much_ , she wants him there to talk to in the evenings, all those words caught in the back of her throat, filling up—invisibly, she can't feel them, they're not really there—the empty spaces of her mouth and trachea, enough in her lungs that they could drown her—

“Yeah, you're just—” Eridan's voice breaks, and her own breath sighs out of her in sympathy, she wants to keen, out of pain, this is all going wrong. Her eyes burn and she doesn't cry, bites her lip instead. “You can't really know. Humans are inferior and their quadrant system is—”

“I've been flirting all wrong, too,” Jade says, sick with the inevitability of it. Of course. “I don't really know how to do it. Fuck! I'm sorry, Eridan,” she says, and she breaks off suddenly because she can't be pitiful. No flirting when the thing that never started is ending.

“...Why were you trying to?” Eridan says suddenly, and Jade's heart is in her throat but she is no coward and she squares her shoulders in her shirt and makes herself let go of her skirt and she speaks, damn it.

“I know it's stupid for me to ever be pale for anyone, especially a troll,” she says, and she's proud when her voice doesn't shake. Little victories, she thinks. Rose doesn't do quadrants, but she'll let Jade cry on her shoulder some night soon, and Dave will listen to her, and John will watch movies with her until she's at least somewhat distracted. “But I thought I was, I was—stupid. This was all stupid, but I thought—when you—I want to make sure you have good food and I want you to brush my hair and I don't know what to _call_ it but moirallegiance and it's not that at all, right. Because I'm human,” she says, dully, but humans are just as hard to understand.

Disappointment sings in the back of her throat, but that's stupid, she tells herself. She never had a chance so she has no right to _disappointment_.

“You're pale for me,” Eridan says, and she can't help it, but she wraps her arms around herself like everything will be okay only if she can physically hold herself together. Maybe she should just teleport away. There's no need to stay for him to mock her. She was _so stupid_. And Eridan, of all people. Karkat is pitiable—but she doesn't like him like that. It's the stupid thing about all of this.

“Don't rub it in,” she says, a threat, her head bowing. She jumps when his hand falls on her back, in-between her shoulder blades, bared because her hair's pulled over her shoulder. She can feel the damp skin—he just got out of the water—through her shirt.

“Really pale,” he says, rubbing slowly, tentatively, his claw-tips catching against the weave of her shirt, like he's testing something. “You—you were _flirtin'_ with me. Just me.”

“Fuck you!” Jade snaps, but she can't step away.

“Not that fuckin' blight on the planet Strider?”

“Dave? No! We're—friends. Whatever happens when you save the world together. Family.”

“You were all over him.” Eridan is deeply suspicious, and it cuts down to her heart.

Even as it makes her snap. “Don't be stupid!”

“...I'm gonna do something stupid,” Eridan tells her, and she's about to run for it, she can't take much more, but he crosses to face her, one half-webbed hand on each shoulder, and his lips are cool and his gills are fluttering right in front of her face as he leans in, and his hands move to part her hair, so gently, and he presses a slow, hesitant kiss against her forehead. Jade breathes in on a sob.

“Eridan,” she says.

“I couldn't take you flirtin' because you're a diamond temptress, Jade,” he tells her, so solemn, and she laughs as she leans in to kiss his neck, her fingers blind above her head, on the line of his jaw, delicate as seaweed—Feferi had shown her earlier, only a single cell layer thick, thinner than it seemed should be possible—on his facial fins. He _let her_. It was a miracle and it didn't end.

“Stupid,” she says again, and he hugs her, suddenly, crushingly close but carefully controlled, and she squeezes him back just as hard, and finally lets herself cry into his shoulder.

“Jade—Jade. That's gross.”

“Shut up,” she mutters, thickly, and for now, he does.

-End-


End file.
